Reggae legend Burning Spear has been through more than his share of trials, but the biggest test of Spear’s positive message of unity, peace, and love came on his first trip to Kenya last year.

The country had been rocked with violence when a bitter election campaign sparked intergroup conflict that raged for months. The United Nations called on Spear, who had adopted at the start of his career the nom de guerre of Kenyan freedom fighter and first president Jomo Kenyatta, to perform in Nairobi. Spear was welcomed like a long-lost king and stayed on the spot where Kenyatta fought for the country’s independence from the U.K. Nonetheless, the concert organizer was so nervous about the potential for bloodshed among listeners that she was sick to her stomach.

“Kenya was really rough at that time; people bang against people,” Spear recalls, in his Jamaican accent. “All the guys were fighting each other, hurting each other in some viscous and terrible ways.” But the 65,000 Kenyans gathered at the outdoor venue came together peacefully, waved their flags, and walked home without incident. “I bring them together for about three hours. They were hugging and jumping up together. One can see the force of the music.”

This force is evident on Spear’s new album, Jah is Real (Burning Music), the latest in a long, productive career that began with a chance meeting with Bob Marley and has finally reached a place of peace and self-sufficiency that shows the relevance of Marcus Garvey in the age of the Internet.

Burning Spear’s musical journey began in a field in his home parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, where he ran into Bob Marley and struck up a conversation about breaking into the music world. “Bob was traveling with a donkey and all these various plants. We were there talking,” Spear explains. “Bob was young, dreadlocks just start to spring. I was asking Bob how I could get started and where could I go to get that start. He asked me if I know Studio One.”

Studio One was the Kingston-based center of the Jamaican music storm brewing in the 1960s and 1970s, often compared to Motown. Its main producer, Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, was one of the first people to hear Burning Spear’s songs, and he asked him to come back and record. Spear was so excited, he returned to Studio One early the next morning. “When I get there so early, the place didn’t seem open. I was so anxious. I stood there until the place open and musicians show up. I go in, do my thing. It came out sounding good,” so good that Spear eventually cut four singles and two albums for the label.

But despite Spear’s strong songs and growing popularity, getting paid for his work became a nightmare. After repeatedly wrangling with Dodd, Spear sighs, “I just get fed up and decided to stop going. Then I start to think, ‘Because I am a Rastaman, that is why Mr. Dodd is not doing what he should do for me.’ So I decided to cut my dreadlock and back to Studio One, thinking I am doing the right thing. It became worse. It became worse.”

Discouraged, Spear headed back home and chilled on the beach until his singing attracted the attention of young producer Jack Ruby. With Ruby, Spear cut one of reggae’s most important records, Marcus Garvey, which set the musical tone and message for Spear’s long career. Garvey, philosopher, activist, orator, and prophet to Rastafarians, became one of Spear’s greatest inspirations, and he still reads Garvey’s writings on a daily basis. Garvey’s message of self-reliance, economic independence, and self-respect gradually took on new meaning for Spear as his career blossomed, yet he reaped none of the benefits.

After years on the road, multiple successful albums, and endless hard work, Spear found himself back in Jamaica in the 1980s, struggling to provide the basics for his family. Labels, distributors, and booking agents along the way bilked Spear of payment for his music. He began to realize that he had to go into business for himself to gain the respect he deserved: “I insist that I need to own something. I would do anything which is good to own something. But it take time and patience and discipline.” Much as Marley did when he founded Tuff Gong, Spear knew he had to apply Garvey’s teachings to the business end of his music and he has succeeded. While much has been said about new models for independent musicians in the age of the Internet, Spear is one of the few who has come to it from the teaching of a Black nationalist.

Last year on his blog (yes, the 63-year old has an eight-year old blog), Burning Spear wrote, “You cannot remain silent while people trample on your rights. For year reggae artist have been going through hell. None ’as any respect for us. Records label continue to collect our publishing, and royalty without paying us, even when agreements are up. Then when I man manufacture my own CDs and watch as this illegal Distribution label start to control all what mines. I decided I would no longer be silent’s.”

Now thriving in Queens, New York as an independent artist and a vital Rasta elder, Spear is done with compromise: No shady industry shenanigans, no bikini-clad babes on the cover, no nonsense, just good solid music, thanks in part to America’s founding funk fathers Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell, who appear on Jah is Real, and a remix of “Step It” by Brian Hardgroove of Public Enemy fame. Spear has made it his mission to remind both staunch fans and new listeners of their historical and musical roots, drawing on his own experience.

“Grandfather” reminds listeners of slavery’s mark on places like the Carolinas, a mark that Spear feels too many have forgotten, as proven by media reports of enslaved workers on Long Island and nooses hung on doorknobs. “Stick with the Plan,” harkening back to the days of Studio One when Spear cut his hair, reminds listeners that “We can’t turn our back on our trail, the original trail.”

“One Africa” reflects the lessons Spear learned while in Kenya, and asks African leaders to band together and look forward, setting aside old grievances for the good of all. His social involvement in Kenya is reminiscent of the time he wrote “First Lady,” which called for Jamaica to elect its first female prime minister and which appeared on the album Our Music. When Portia Simpson-Miller became the country’s first female head of state, she insisted on meeting Spear personally, with tears in her eyes. Spear’s wife and manager Sonia Rodney recalls Simpson-Miller saying, “Burning Spear, people don’t know you, they don’t know what you do for Jamaica.”

It’s striking that in a year when an African-American of Kenyan descent secured the Democratic nomination and the most successful woman’s bid for the U.S. presidency occurred, Burning Spear releases an album that continues his multi-decade career calling for justice and unity. It turns out the man in the hills was ahead of his time and America is finally catching up with him on Jah is Real.

What if the spirit warrior goddess had blown through the Hurricane Club during Duke Ellington’s early 1940s flirtations with Latin jazz? Jazz saxophonist and composer Paul Carlon and his Octet imagine just such a musical scenario on their latest album, Roots Propaganda (Deep Tone). The ensemble returns to the roots of classic jazz and to the Afro-Latin roots that have sent Carlon on a spiritual journey of sound around Latin America. His mission: to bring roots music center stage and jazz back down to earth.

A long-time pro on the intense New York scene, a jazz educator, and a self-admitted “sax head,” Carlon feels jazz has gotten a bad rap lately for being too abstract and just plain hard. “Jazz has become an inside thing. How it got from where it started to where it is now is a long story,” Carlon muses. “I am more interested in making music like Cuban timba, which has a roots history but incorporates funk… in figuring out how you get the blues into rumba. Making roots music through a jazz lens.”

Carlon focuses this lens by rewinding jazz history and returning to the arranging techniques Duke Ellington was famous for: writing parts for individual, idiosyncratic musical personalities instead of technical ranges and timbres. Carlon thinks carefully about what lines to give the Octet’s two trombonists, the warm double trombones propelling many a Cuban number. While Ryan Keberle tears into trombone solos with a wild energy—“music just flies out of him,” Carlon laughs—Mike Fahie likes to dig into the fringes of the trombone’s capacity, playing with multiphonic resonance and other twists from the free-jazz palate. Sometimes, Carlon doesn’t chart his musicians’ course at all, urging them to improvise. Improvisation, Carlon feels, is one of the many deep links uniting jazz and the lush heritage of Afro-Latin music.

Another link is singer Christelle Durandy. Born in France with parents from the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe and the island of Réunion off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, Durandy grew up playing percussion and dancing with her family’s folkloric group in Guadaloupe. Though she always wanted to sing, her father insisted that they first play instruments. The versatile singer has also lived in Cuba and Réunion. “The jazz aesthetic is to record live,” explains Carlon, “and Christelle needs very few takes, nailing just about everything right from the start. Her instincts are really right on.”

The old-school relationship between Carlon and his fellow musicians isn’t the only link uniting the Octet with the jazz greats. Carlon wants to play for people, and for those people to have fun. “I don’t want to beat people over the head with being deep,” Carlon smiles. “I want to have a good time, and I want the audience to have a good time whether they catch all the details or not.”

One thing many listeners catch is the Octet’s unique connection to visual imagery, and some have teased Carlon that he could have composed soundtracks for Fellini films. The Octet got its start collaborating with Carlon’s artist mother on a multi-media project dedicated to the immigrant experience. Growing up in a house filled with huge canvasses and visual artists, Carlon remembers “I soon started to realize the way my mother and I think was a lot alike. That must be where I got some of my inspiration from: thinking about art. It was always just there, and I was always standing next to a huge canvas with paint on it, trying to understand what it means.”

With an affinity for Carlon’s own roots in rural Upstate New York, the music and spiritual traditions of Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil have shaped Carlon’s work in ways he himself could not anticipate. During stays in Cuba and Brazil, Carlon experienced the African religions of Latin America first hand, and their sounds and energy left an indelible impression. After a difficult and unexpected break up, Carlon couldn’t get a Yoruba chant to the goddess Oya out of his head. Oya, whose hurricane-force upheaval can destroy and renew at the same time, had swept through Carlon’s own life, making him ripe for new musical beginnings and a new recording. The resulting piece, “Yorubonics,” morphs the chant into a multi-layered call and response that passes from rough dissonance to irrepressible harmony.

“I love the chant quality of Afro-Cuban song,” says Carlon. “Swing music also has a chant quality. You have these riffs repeated like a chant. There is something mysterious about it. But I don’t add percussion. I like a drummer who is loose enough to interact with the rest of the band. That’s a jazz thing. My drummer—William “Beaver” Bausch—is steeped in Cuban music. We bump up the rhythm with tap dancer Max Pollak on the album and live. And then my horns, in a sense, are the voices. The horns interact with Christelle’s voice. She sings and the horns do the response. I love that.”

Carlon was led to include the mbira, or thumb piano, thanks to a similarly intense connection between the personal, spiritual, and sonic. After Carlon’s father passed away suddenly in 2001, “Devastated and exhausted, my sister and I went to a little import shop in Syracuse. I picked up the mbira that I now play with the Octet, trying to figure out the logic of it. I was just messing with it and put a Cuban groove on it. It turned into a spirit call. When the spirit calls, you can’t resist it. When the spirit called my father, he had to go.” The mbira called Carlon back to simple melodies, which he soon elaborated into complex instrumental arrangements, the way voices can multiply the power of a simple chant.

At the heart of the Carlon Octet’s work lies roots music, from Delta blues—the album features an arrangement of the classic “Hard Times Killing Floor Blues”—to cumbia. Carlon was surprised to discover that some of his Latino friends didn’t know much about American roots music, and that many of his jazz friends didn’t know much about Latin roots music. “I am interested in combining all roots music. Not necessarily to make a point, but because I love it all. So I’m trying to take these disparate elements and put them into a jazz context.”

"Every day we get bombarded with stuff. Roots music can be so hard to find, even in this online world,” Carlon explains. “It's always hidden. How come nobody talks about that? We need to get it out there. That was the idea behind Roots Propaganda: We need some propaganda for this kind of music.”

When young Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis found a fragment of a beautiful song from North Uist in an Edinburgh archive, she was stumped. So she returned to her remote island home in the Outer Hebrides to see if anyone there knew the rest: “The fragment started on the second line. But it’s that key first line that triggers everyone’s memory,” Fowlis explains, “so nobody could remember.”

She turned to her neighbor Hugh Matheson, a reserved but warm and gentlemanly local expert known for his mastery of the island’s wealth of songs and tales. Suffering from a lung ailment, Hugh couldn’t get out more than a few lines for Fowlis’ tape recorder. They chatted for a while afterward, and when Julie had packed her equipment and was halfway out the door, Hugh suddenly burst into verse after verse. “That was the only time he sang me the whole song,” Fowlis smiles, and she learned it on the spot.

By cultivating ancient roots and an overlooked language, Julie Fowlis has moved Gaelic song from the edge of the world (her home island North Uist is one of the Westernmost points in Europe) to center stage. Her latest album, Cuilidh, (Shoeshine Records/Cadiz Music)—which means “treasury” or “secret hiding place” in Gaelic—is a trove of everything from lighthearted mouth music to serious ballads chronicling life and loss on the rugged island and its rough seas. Fowlis’ delicate, heartfelt renditions have moved major British celebrities, from Radiohead drummer Phil Selway to British comedian Ricky Gervais, and won Fowlis a spate of important U.K. music awards. Her album is sure to appeal to audiences across the musical spectrum. Her label, Shoeshine, is run by Francis Macdonald from Teenage Fanclub, well-loved by indie/Nirvana generation music fans.

Growing up, Fowlis was surrounded by song and traditional music, and even at her tiny local school with only twelve students, music was a vital part of the curriculum: “We had only one teacher but were lucky to have a tutor visit for lessons on the pipes,” Fowlis remembers. “Also, we would learn a little Gaelic song or a wee poem or wee rhyme,” which youngsters were expected to perform for adults at community gatherings.

At these events or at home, friends and family members told the stories and sang the songs that recounted shipwrecks, past scandals, and great-great-grandmothers’ affairs of the heart. This song lineage is a key part of Gaelic traditional life: “People know your exact genealogy. If you translate from Gaelic into English, the question ‘Where are you from?’ changes to ‘Who are you from?’ You get that feeling from the songs. If you know somebody’s full name, you know exactly who their ancestors were. We can date our family to 1500 and before, just from that oral tradition.”

North Uist is one of the few places in Scotland where this age-old song line has not been broken and where the majority of people still speak Gaelic as a first language. Long denigrated by Scotland’s overlords and neglected by modern cultural authorities, Scottish Gaelic was not recognized as an official language in Scotland until 2005, several years after the region gained an autonomous parliament. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, children were forbidden to use the language at school. Only one percent of the population can speak the language of the vast store of songs tucked away by past generations in the voices and memories of their descendants. Songs often sway with the rhythm of daily life, rowing, hay making, butter churning, or waulking, the arduous final stage in making the world renowned much sought-after Harris Tweed.

“Looking back, these people had a really hard life. They were on the edge of the world, and the weather was extreme, the conditions were hard. Through music and song, they were very expressive people, though they were rarely formally educated,” Fowlis muses. “They were always singing and writing poetry. It could be something light hearted, talking about the food on the table or the cow outside, or something that washed up on beach. Or it could be something completely beautiful.”

Many of these songs are so enmeshed with the sound and rhythm of the Gaelic language that faithful translation is out of the question. “Don’t get the wrong impression about us,” Fowlis laughs. Cryptic-sounding songs like “Celebrate the Great Bonnet!” are examples of mouth music, coherent yet nonsensical tongue-twisting lyrics woven from alliteration and linguistic flourishes to seamlessly match a dance tune. This centuries-old tradition flourished after the 18th-century prohibition of Scottish instruments, tartans, language, and other vital aspects of traditional culture, when people needed something to dance to. Other mouth music songs on Cuilidh (pronounced KOOL-ee ) give silly, earthy snapshots of everything from feisty geezers and potatoes to manure piles.

Yet perhaps the richest vein of song Fowlis draws on is the ballads recounting major events in her small community, heart-wrenching tragedies and gossip-worthy scandals. “Some of these songs are ten years old, and some are five hundred,” she notes. They tell the tale of an uprising of World War I veterans cheated out of their promised land, of headstrong young women refusing to marry anyone but their true love, of high-born beauties fleeing their lavish weddings. This last event, the shocking elopement of Jesse of Balranald with a man from a nearby island, inspired so many songs that “I had to whittle it down to two from seven or eight,” Fowlis giggles. “I couldn’t do a whole album of songs about Jesse.”

And in a fascinating twist of fate, these stories, sung in a language spoken by only 60,000 people, have captured the imagination of British listeners, including various stars and indie rockers. After Fowlis began winning a streak of UK awards for best folk singer and most promising emerging artist several years ago, she caught the ears of a rapidly growing number of mainstream music fans, something unprecedented for a Scottish Gaelic singer. Most attribute it to her voice, the pure, precise, lilting tone that reflects Fowlis’ passion for the songs and conveys absolute confidence born of living with these songs for a lifetime.

Hailed as the first Gaelic crossover artist, Fowlis exhibits this confidence most brightly when she cheerfully brushes aside suggestions she sing in English or change her approach to making music. “It's a glass-half-empty or half-full situation, and it is difficult to know whether the language barrier is a positive or negative thing. I've always seen it as a positive thing, though it does seem to be becoming a big deal for everyone but me,” Fowlis told Glasgow’s The Herald in a recent interview. “I'm more than happy to sing in English…but Gaelic is what I know and what I love.”